The fact that a citizen can take another person or organization to court has been one of the bedrocks of American tradition. Unfortunately, as with any system, there will be some people who take advantage of it and risk ruining things for everyone else.

Someone’s coffee was hot. They sued. Now people joke that they could also sue if the coffee was not hot enough, but I bet someone has actually tried that. Cropped from a photo by David Thompson.

The first time I remember hearing about a court case that I found to be ridiculous was the infamous woman who sued McDonald’s due to scalding hot coffee. I have a little more sympathy for her after finding out some of the myths, but she still did spill it herself. In the 20 years since then, we have been increasingly met with legalese wherever we turn from lawyers who attempt to protect their clients from liability. Most disclaimers are common sense labels, e.g. keep plastic bags away from babies, and probably do some good.

Disclaimers really begin to change perceptions when they are spoken, however. Turbulence is a good example of this. Airplanes have had fasten seat belt indicators for decades so they don’t get sued if someone bumps their head.

You are typically forced to sit down and fasten your seat belt, regardless of other possible consequences. Cropped from a photo by Daniel Williams.

A similar sign like this elsewhere would merely provide advice, but announcements remind passengers that they must obey posted placards on-board (the only time I ever still hear the word, placard). However, flight attendants are stuck with a kind of semi-authority so they vary in their enforcement. I have seen some stand near passengers and shame them into sitting back down. Some delight in their new-found power and threaten people in coach until they submit. Yet as one flight attendant said on my recent United flight to Denver, “We are not police.” Then the other crew members proceeded to remind every other passenger who stood up that they were required to say people should remain seated, though they did not intend to actually stop any passengers from getting up. Flight attendants did the right thing and covered their ass while letting common sense prevail in the air for once.

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Readers of my last post no doubt expected that I would write about HP and Palm next. I applaud the move for reasons I will explain later, but for now I want to talk about something perhaps more important: privacy.

Some people want to share absolutely everything online. The Foursquare satire, Please Rob Me, and heavily funded startup, Blippy, have shown that doing so is not always a good idea. Some Blippy members’ credit and debit card numbers were published to the world in Google search results. The privacy breach continued even after a supposed fix. Whoops.

(Credit card numbers in search results — every webmaster’s worst nightmare and every thief’s dream)

Before you call me a Luddite, I should say that I love social networking sites as long as I retain control over who sees what. Of course Blippy’s problem was due to a lapse in security, but it never would have happened if users had chose not to discard their privacy by volunteering their credit card numbers in the first place. And lest you ask, Blippy is different than a typical eCommerce site because its raison d’être is the overexposure of sharing shopping behavior.

I think there needs to be a little more common sense from consumers and independent analysis in the online industry. It should not require FTC investigations or Congressional oversight, as was suggested after Google Buzz complaints (warning, contains justified profanity). It means the fourth estate doing their job.

For instance, despite the backlash against Google Buzz, initial concerns about Google Social Search have all but disappeared.

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